A handful of "contrarian" scientists and public figures
who are not scientists have challenged mainstream climatologists' conclusions
that the warming of the last few decades has been extraordinary and that at
least part of this warming has been anthropogenically induced. What must be
emphasized here is that, despite the length of this section, there are truly
only a handful of climatologist contrarians relative to the number of mainstream
climatologists out there. Like all scientific fields, when contrary claims appear
in climate research, they are to be given due attention by climatologists. But
initially, they are not usually given much weight, as it is highly likely that
most claims calling for radical revisions to conventional wisdom will be disproved
or contain many inconsistencies that lead scientists to doubt them. When asked
about my opinion of the paradigm-altering claims of most contrarians (wasn't
Galileo also dismissed by the establishment?), I typically reply that indeed,
we must carefully examine all claims that, if true, would lead to paradigm
shifts like that caused by Galileo, but at the same time, it is wise to note
that for every real Galileo or Einstein who radically alters conventional wisdom,
there are probably a thousand "fossil fools". Nevertheless, these contrarians
are given disproportionate representation in the media (see Mediarology)
and by certain governments, especially the Bush Administration, so far (see
below).

Two of the most visible contrarians, astrophysicists Sallie
Baliunas and Willie Soon, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics,
have challenged both of these notions (warming and anthropogenic causation).
They contradicted the conclusions of Mann and others that temperatures
rises in the late twentieth century are unusual (discussed in this section,
and in It is well-established that the Earth's surface air temperature
has warmed significantly), saying that medieval temperatures were greater
than those of recent years (see Soon
and Baliunas, 2003 and an accompanying press release,
as well as Baliunas' opinion article in the Providence Journal).
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Soon and Baliunas received about $53,000, or 5% of their
2003 study's cost, from the American Petroleum Institute (API), the oil and
gas industry's main trade organization (see "Warming Study Draws Fire"). In addition, they
are members of the George C. Marshall Institute, a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit
that opposes limits on CO2 emissions and supported ths "Star Wars" space-based
missile defense proposals. (For a revealing look at the contrarian views of
The Marshall Institue, see their May
2004 Policy Outlook.)

The intense discord surrounding the publication of the aforementioned
Soon and Baliunas article in Climate Research
continues to grow, and sadly, it has degraded the journal's reputation in the
process. Many hoped that the fledgling journal (whose then editor — Chris
de Freitas — ignored several devastating peer reviews and published Baliunas
and Soon anyway) would revise its editorial policies and consider changes to
its editorial board and process, but none of these occurred. As a result, Hans
von Storch, the next appointed Editor-in-Chief of Climate Research, as
well as four other editors (Clare Goodess, Mitsuru Ando, Shardul Argawala, and
Andrew Comrie) have resigned. See von Storch's note on "The CR Problem" on his website, a Wall Street Journal article on the debacle, and
Andrew Comrie's
resignation letter). Many in the scientific community are still hoping
that the journal can attempt to restore credibility by admitting its mistake
in publishing — despite ignoring critical peer reviews — the Soon
and Baliunas "science" in the first place. In a critical mood but with tongue-in-cheek,
I proposed to Mike Mann that he, Ray Bradley, and Malcolm Hughes write a critique
of the astrophysical publications of astrophysicists Soon and Baliunas and publish
it in my journal, Climatic Change. "It would be ludicrous", was
the reply. "Probably, just like Soon and Baliunas pretending they can do sophisticated
climatology," I said, reflecting my skeptical view of the quality of their climatology
work. For more information, listen to a summary of the Mann et al. versus Soon and Baliunas debate
from January 2004, produced by BBC Radio 4 (see Programme 1).

Baliunas, 2002 also stirred up major controversy when
she claimed that any warming that has occurred has not been caused by human
activities but primarily by natural forces like the sun: “Thus, the recent
surface warming trend may owe largely to changes in the sun's energy output.”
(Fred Singer, perhaps the "dean of contrarians", and the President of his think
tank, the Science and Environmental Policy Project, expressed similar
doubts in 2000 — see his testimony to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science,
and Transportation). Laut, 2003
and Kristjansson, Staple, and Kristiansen, 2002 then critiqued
Baliunas' (and others') enthusiasm for a solar hypothesis, and Azar and Schneider, 2002 critiqued contrarian pessimism
over the costs of greenhouse gas abatement — another staple of contrarian
claims. The article, Laut, 2003, was attacked in a rebuttal
prepared by Henrik Svensmark, a scientist at the Danish Space Research Institute
and a firm believer in solar hypotheses, which Laut quickly disputed
with a rebuttal
of his own. Laut explains that Svensmark misunderstands the data used in both
Laut's and Svensmark's research, and insinuates that Svensmark's rebuttal was
posted on his institute's website rather than in a scholarly journal because
Svensmark's comments, in the words of Laut, "cannot avoid creating the impression,
that they only express his personal ideas and could not withstand a critical
review". Damon
and Laut, 2004 have since published another article that can be summarized
by its title: "Pattern of Strange Errors Plagues Solar Activity and Terrestrial
Climate Data." The paper does not refute Baliunas' work per se, but it
hits on the work of other supporters of solar hypotheses and illuminates (and
refutes) common -- and suspicious -- patterns of data to which solar supporters
have often resorted.

Nevertheless, proponents of the solar hypothesis continue
to bang the same drum. For example, Jaworowski
(2003) states outright that "The atmospheric temperature variations
do not follow the changes in concentation of CO2 and other trace GHGs. However, they are consistent with
the changes in Sun's activity...". Jaworowski is perhaps even more contrarian
than most, claiming that he can prove the climate is going to get colder through
his work excavating glaciers on six different continents, which he says indicates
what we should really be worrying about is "The approaching new Ice Age...".
Despite it being obvious to many that Jaworowski is an over-the-top contrarian
who is bending "science" to reach particular conclusions, he was invited
to testify before the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.
He did so on March 19, 2004, presenting a speech titled "Climate Change:
Incorrect information on pre-industrial CO2," in which he said the IPCC's assumption that CO2 levels in the pre-industrial period were low is incorrect,
and the IPCC projections should therefore be thrown out. And we wonder where
the Bush Administration gets its distorted views!

As if Soon, Baliunas, and extreme contrarians like Jaworowski
haven't caused enough grief, Mann's claims that the temperature rise seen in
the late twentieth century is a clear anomaly in historical temperature records,
as shown in his hockey-stick shaped graph, has again been challenged,
this time by Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, a statistician in the mining
industry and an economist, respectively. In their paper, "Corrections to the Mann et. al. (1998) Proxy Data Base and
Northern Hemisphere Average Temperature Series," published in a social
science (rather than climate science) journal titled Energy
& Environment, McIntyre and McKitrick claim that the proxy data used
by Mann et al. (1998) to create their temperature reconstruction
for the years 1400 to 1980 (AD) contained "collation errors, unjustifiable truncation
or extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, geographical location errors,
incorrect calculation of principal components and other quality control defects"
(McIntyre
and McKitrick, 2003, p. 751). McIntyre and McKitrick claimed that when
they applied the exact methodology used by Mann et al. to their source data
(which was partly a highly modified version of data provided to them by Mann
et al.), they found that global average temperatures actually peaked in the
fifteenth century, and not the twentieth.

Mann and his colleagues and other members of the
scientific community were outraged when they learned of the publication
of the McIntyre/McKitrick article. Most credible scientific journals
receiving criticism of previously published work typically give the
authors under fire the chance to review and respond to an article
challenging their claims. Energy
& Environment never gave Mann and his colleagues that
chance, and it was not clear whether any of the reviewers who did look
over the paper were well-known climatologists or other natural
scientists qualified to judge the validity of such a paper (nor have I
seen any evidence that McIntyre and McKitrick have any training in
climatology or natural science!). In fact, it is well known that the
editor of Energy & Environment,
Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen, has sometimes allowed her political agenda,
rather than the high standards of scientific peer review, to dominate
the content of the journal. In 2003, Boehmer-Christiansen also allowed
the publication of another Soon and Baliunas paper nearly identical to
the one published in Climate Research
(discussed above), and she is known to be against ratification of the
Kyoto Protocol and supportive of the work of Bjørn Lomborg,
another contrarian (discussed below). Though Energy & Environment is
geared toward social scientists, she told the Chronicle of Higher Education that
she published scientific papers that refute the notion that global
warming is a problem because there are very few outlets for such work.
This practice fits nicely with her political stance (see, e.g., Parsons,
1995 — comment on page two) and calls the objectivity of Energy & Environment into
question. (See an e-mail from Boehmer-Christiansen regarding the
McIntyre/McKitrick paper to Michael Mann that was posted on the
internet and an e-mail
response from co-author Raymond Bradley).

McIntyre and McKitrick selectively censored some important data
used by Mann et al. (by either eliminating it completely or
substituting other data for it), especially for the period from
1400-1600 AD, where their results deviate most from Mann's. Much of the
data censored were key proxy indicators that added to cooling in the
fifteenth century.

McIntyre and McKitrick claimed that some of their data
omissions/substitutions were due to the fact that not all of the Mann
et al. data were available to them. However, Mann says his datasets
were actually available online and have been for the last couple of
years.

McIntyre's and McKitrick's methodology also had technical
problems. For example, they used a decomposition based on one surface
temperature data set with standardization factors based on a different temperature data set,
effectively mashing together two sets of incompatible data.

McIntyre and McKitrick requested a spreadsheet of the Mann et al.
(1998) proxy data, and the data they received from one of Mann's
colleagues were incorrect. Mann takes the blame for this but also
wonders why the authors didn't visit the website containing all the
data sets in the first place. This inaccurate data set could explain
why McIntyre and McKitrick could not reproduce the Mann et al. (1998)
"hockey stick" reconstruction. In addition, the data provided to
McIntyre and McKitrick contained only 112 proxy indicator series,
whereas Mann's work actually had 159.

Anyone wishing to verify any of this should contact Mann or consult his website.

While the McIntyre-McKitrick paper's inadequacies were very
clear to these climatologists from the get-go (and are still being debated in
journals at the moment), that did not prevent the media from picking up on the
paper and providing a very one-sided account of the results (see a USA Today op-ed, a correction to the op-ed, a rebuttal of the op-ed by Mann, and a rebuttal of both the McIntyre and McKitrick paper and the USA
Today op-ed by Annie Petsonk of Environmental Defense). After
reading Mann’s and others’ rebuttals, McIntyre and McKitrick went
on to create a "he said-she said account" of their interactions with
Mann and his colleagues, which has also received much attention. This controversy
will undoubtedly continue to brew for years to come. In fact, I know of at least
two comments and rebuttals now in review in scientific journals — hopefully,
the debate might eventually take place in the appropriate forums for such technically-complex
issues. Though the wheels turn slowly in such peer-reviewed journals, they move
inexorably and I expect the science will advance from these exchanges. It is
sad it started as politics and has culminated in such rancor and distrust on
all sides. I do not question the propriety of McIntyre and McKitrick in challenging
methodological issues in Mann et all; in fact that is what science is about.
But the lack of review by those attacked and the political circus that followed
was very unfortunate.

Since the time these controversies broke out,
Mann and Jones have added to the evidence that their findings on
temperature trends are correct. Through the examination of instrumental
records, documentary material, tree rings, corals, and ice cores, among
other things, and focusing "not just on proxy reconstructions of past
temperature history but also on associated changes in a number of other
fields such as precipitation and drought patterns and atmospheric
circulation diagnostics as well as the complementary changes in these
variables in climate model integrations", Jones and Mann, 2004 found additional evidence
to support their prior assertions that the late 20th Century warming
has been unprecedented in the Northern Hemisphere and most likely the
entire world. They again found that warming of the 20th Century was
greater than that of any other Century in the preceding two millennia.
In addition, Jones and Mann report that whereas natural variability
does well at explaining temperature changes up through the 19th
Century, only anthropogenic forcing can explain 20th Century warming:

Assessment of the empirical evidence provided by proxies of
climate change over the past two millennia, combined with climate
modeling efforts to explain the changes that have occurred during the
period, indicates that solar and volcanic forcing have likely played
the dominant roles among the potential natural causes of climate
variability. Neither can explain, however, the dramatic warming of the
late 20th century; indeed, natural factors would favor a slight cooling
over this period. Only anthropogenic influences (principally, the
increases in greenhouse gas concentrations) are able to explain, from a
causal point of view, the recent record high level of global
temperatures during the late 20th century.

Stay tuned, more on this will emerge every week; e.g., see
a Nature
item reporting a study by Moberg et al (and see Anderson
and Woodhouse, 2005). As Rahmstorf mentions in the item, the evidence
of anthropogenic warming is based on hundreds of "fingerprint" types
of analyses, and what happened 1000 years ago or 100 million is just part of
the edifice of our understanding of the climate system, and not itself the sole
proof for, nor proof against, anthropogenic global warming (see also Revkin
2005). My take: look for replication studes done by the scientific community
at large. For example, work done at NCAR by Amman and Wahl should be published
in the near future

Other contrarians have made arguments along lines analogous
to those of McIntyre and McKitrick. In an article in GSA Today, Shaviv and Veizer, 2003 claim that long-term CO2-induced warming will not be as great as most General
Circulation Models (see Climate
Modeling) predict. They echo (though on a very long time scale) the
Soon and Baliunas view when they say "...celestial phenomena may be important
for understanding the vagaries of the planetary climate." Their comments that
"global climate produces a stabilizing negative feedback" and "A likely candidate
for such feedback is cloud cover" are similar to the views of Richard Lindzen,
another long-time contrarian, who believes that climate sensitivity will be
much less than most climatologists are predicting. (See Lindzen,
1997; Lindzen et al., 2001; and the figure Estimates of Climate
Sensitivity, in which Lindzen is Scientist 5. Hartmann and Michelsen, 2002 prepared a rebuttal to Lindzen,
2001, which prompted a response from Lindzen et al., 2002, followed by additional comments from Hartmann and Michelsen). See
also a comment by Phillip Stott, a biogeographer at the University
of London who is skeptical of anthropogenic global warming, and who cites both
Soon and Baliunas, and Shaviv and Veizer to support his opinion. Many climatologists
found it telling that Shaviv and Veizer failed to mention Hoffert and Covey, 1992; Crowley, 2000; Crowley and Berner, 2001; all of which are written
by climate scientists and provide striking evidence for CO2 climate sensitivity from paleo-climatological data.

A group of fourteen scientists at the Potsdam Institute
for Climate Impact Research (PICIR) responded to Shaviv and Veizer with a short
letter discussing the "highly questionable methods" the
two authors employed. This was followed by a response from Shaviv and Veizer, followed by additional comments
from the PICIR scientists. A more formal rebuttal has since been prepared
by Rahmstorf et al., 2004. The authors conclude that
the correlation of cosmic ray flux and climate is not as strong as it appears
in the Shaviv and Veizer paper; they claim that Shaviv and Veizer adjusted the
data to make the correlation more pronounced than it actually is. In addition,
Rahmstorf et al. are skeptical of Shaviv and Veizer's estimate of the effects
that a doubling of CO2 levels would have on
the climate. They contend that Shaviv and Veizer's regression model used for
making this determination is incomplete and oversimplified, which does not suit
a complex, nonlinear system like the climate. Thus, Rahmstorf et al. believe
that Shaviv and Veizer's work is not grounds for revising current climate sensitivity
estimates. This is yet another example of a contrarian pretending to be the
next Galileo, which is very unlikely in my opinion, but for more replies by
Shaviv and Veizer, see this website.

Many of the claims of contrarians like these rest on temperature
inferences made using satellite data rather than surface temperature measurements.
The contrarians insist that satellite data contains little or no evidence of
global warming, and many members of the Bush Administration and their supporters
agree, commenting that the lack of evidence for tropospheric warming from satellite
data suggests that those who believe global warming is occurring are using scare
tactics, as James Schlesinger argues in "Cold Facts on Global Warming". This is unsurprising,
perhaps, given that Schlesinger is currently a director of Peabody Energy, the
largest coal company in the world, and was Secretary of Energy during the Carter
Administration, Secretary of Defense during the Nixon and Ford Administrations,
and director of the CIA. One thing he never was is a climate scientist. Both
David Hawkins, Climate Center Director of the National Resources Defense Council
(NRDC), and John Holdren, Professor of Environmental Policy at Harvard, wrote
letters to the editor of the LA Times (which published Schlesinger's op-ed),
revealing the telling biographical information about Schlesinger and warning
that global warming is real and will become an increasing threat over time,
which calls for action over delay. Holdren continued on by stating that Schlesinger's
"...principal assertions about the findings of climate science are wrong." He
reminds his audience that the satellite data Schlesinger cites is still not
well understood, that the claim that temperatures were higher in 1100-1200 AD
is not supported in mainstream peer-reviewed science, and "scare tactics" are
not actually "scare tactics", but scientific findings and well-informed projections
on future climatic conditions, which indeed have the potential to be frightening.
To my knowledge, neither letter to the editor was ever published -- hardly an
example of "fair and balanced" media coverage.

In reality, the satellite record is very
controversial. As Schneider, 1996a mentioned early on in the
satellite debate, satellite techniques are the most, not least
uncertain trend indicators: "the satellite technique still has not
satisfactorily accounted for distorting effects of tall rain clouds
over extensive parts of tropical oceans and thus has not yet been
proved to provide a fully calibrated temperature trend record for a
known segment of the atmosphere.... the surface temperature thermometer
network, because it [the surface thermometer record] is both a
long-term record (some ten times longer than the satellite data) and a
measure of climate where it is most important for humans and nature (at
the surface), is still the best measure yet available for climate
inferences". In my view, surface temperature measurements and
historical records are more reliable, especially for surface trends.
Significant controversy has arisen over what satellite records actually
show, with contrarians claiming that it is indisputable that satellite
records do not support
global warming claims and other scientists using satellite data to show
that global warming is
occurring (see Santer
et al., 2003, Santer
et al., 2003a, and an article in agreement with the former
Santer et al. article, by Hoskins,
2003; see also the Wigley testimony — his Figure 7). A new study
performed by private satellite experts at Remote Sensing Systems has
found that weather satellite data from the past 24 years actually shows
that tropospheric temperatures are increasing, not decreasing
as many contrarians believe (see "New
View of Data Supports Human Link to Global Warming"). Vinnikov and Grody, 2003 obtained similar
results.

Fu
et al., 2004 have taken such evidence a step farther, providing
an explanation for why satellite-derived temperatures in Earth's lower
astmosphere (troposphere) have been rising more slowly than most models
predict, especially given the rate at which Earth's surface is warming.
By analyzing microwave emissions from the atmosphere recorded by NOAA's
polar orbiting satellites between 1979 and 2001, Fu and his colleagues
found that interactions between the troposphere and the stratosphere
(the layer above the troposphere) were causing the seemingly anomalous
tropospheric temperature results. The team used the satellite data to
calculate the temperatures of the atmospheric layers and found that
stratospheric cooling, a known effect of GHGs and ozone depletion, was
responsible for differences in temperature between the ground and the
satellite-derived lower troposphere. By removing the stratospheric
cooling and performing a statistical analysis, Fu et al. found that the
lower troposphere has actually warmed faster than Earth's
surface and the trends in the lower atmosphere are very similar to
those of the surface. Recent warming of about 0.2°C per decade
appears to be occurring in the troposphere. Fu et al. believe that
nobody has reached the same conclusion using satellite data because the
channel on microwave sounding units that is supposed to measure
troposphere temperature (channel 2) is not totally accurate — about one
fifth of the signal it picks up comes from the stratosphere, which is
decreasing in temperature about five times faster than the troposphere
is increasing. They knew that channel 4 on the microwave sounding units
measured tropospheric temperature, so they used information from
weather balloons at different altitudes and data from channels 2 and 4
to find actual tropospheric temperatures.

Many contrarians, especially those who have
relied heavily on satellite data, were quick to criticize Fu et al.'s
results. John Christy (discussed in detail below), in collaboration
with Roy Spencer and Phillip Gentry, all of the University of Alabama
in Huntsville, prepared a press
release claiming that their own interpretations of satellite
data (which concluded that little or no warming was taking place —
i.e., see Spencer and Christy, 2003) were still correct
and that Fu et al. subtracted out more stratospheric cooling than was
actually there. Spencer elaborated upon this in a critique
appearing on the Tech Central Station website, and CO2 and Climate, a website of the Greening Earth
Society, a group of rural electric cooperatives, municipal electric
utilities, their fuel suppliers, and individuals, backed up Spencer's
assertions in two articles on their website — "Nothing's Changed" and "Assault From Above". The backlash against Fu
et al. continued with an e-mail from Timo Hameranta, the moderator of a
yahoo.com group for climate skeptics, to his "reading group" (as well
as Fu, Christy, Spencer, and others). Hameranta questioned many of the
Fu et al. claims, and Johanson, one of the authors of the original Fu
et al. paper, responded, but perhaps without the degree of clarity,
detail, and carefulness required to avoid being re-attacked by the
contrarian set. John Christy got into the fray when he replied to
Johanson's e-mail (and copied the entire reading group, of course),
maintaining his opinion that his dataset was correct and the Fu et al.
data were the most inaccurate produced to-date. Jarl Ahlbeck continued
the e-mail chain, siding with Christy, declaring that the
intercorrelation of stratospheric and tropospheric temperature signals
makes it very difficult to "correct" one temperature or the other.

The overwhelming negative response from Christy and Spencer
and their supporters prompted Fu and Johanson to submit a letter
to the Journal of Climate rebutting the Christy/Spencer accusations.
The letter reaffirms the previous conclusion of Fu et al. Fu and Johanson stated
that after re-evaluating the Fu et al. data, they were still of the belief that
the Fu et al. data was accurate and they had indeed managed to create a tropospheric
temperature series nearly free of stratospheric contamination. They went on
to say that Christy and Spencer's temperature data is likely off by -0.03 to
-0.04 K per decade. And the debate continues... and will continue to continue.

However, like most new data that refutes others' findings,
Fu et al.'s results were expected to be controversial, especially among contrarians,
for whom the refutation of their mantra of no global warming in satellite records
is a serious blow to their oft-repeated claims. However, Fu et al. gathered
considerable support from mainstream climatologists, as many embraced their
results and their significance. Kevin Trenberth, a renowned climatologist and
head of the climate analysis section at NCAR (and an expert on satellite and
instrumental data), was one of the peer reviewers for the Fu et al. paper. He
called their work "a stunningly elegant and accurate method of clarifying global
trends" and called Christy's and Spencer's rebuttals "hogwash". Trenberth also
suggests that Fu et al.'s data will be difficult to counter — or counter
convincingly, at least: "If the models agree with what has happened in the real
world, that gives them more credence. The main cry of the skeptics is that the
models don't agree with the tropospheric temperature change. What (the journal
article) suggests is that the record agrees extremely well in the troposphere."
Like Trenberth, many other mainstream climatologists feel vindicated that their
view of recent analyses of satellite data appears to be consistent with surface
thermometer networks.

As promised, I will return to the subject of John
Christy. Christy is Professor of Atmospheric Science and Director of
the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in
Huntsville and has been a strident and articulate believer that
satellite data can be used to refute warming claims made by mainstream
climatologists, despite earlier doubts about calibration errors
and the strong evidence to the contrary produced by Fu et al. For
example, a paper by Christy et al. appearing in the May 2003 Journal of
Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology stated that the authors believe that
satellite data shows that global atmospheric warming has been occurring
at a rate of 0.07°C since 1978. While this is clearly a positive change in temperature, it
is very modest, and, Christy says, inconsistent with climate model
projections of tropospheric trends (which show much larger increases in
temperature). In addition, Christy has long disagreed with
climatologists on the cause of any warming that has occurred. In a 1997 hearing before the Senate Committee on
Environment and Public Works, Christy reemphasized his view
that most of the rise in temperature that has occurred since the 19th
century is not anthropogenic, but a result of natural variability,
which he stated twice during a discussion at the hearing. First, he
said: "Most of that is caused by natural variability, the rebound from
the 19th Century cold period. What part of that might be caused by our
activities of the .42, I would say at most, .1." Christy said in a
later e-mail to me, dated April 30, 2004, that in 1997, he stated that
at least 51% of 20th Century warming was natural. However, from the
figures given in the quote above, it appears that he believed then that
human influence was responsible for .1/.42 = 23.8% of warming, which
would make the natural component (assuming there are only two
components - anthropogenic and natural) about 76%, which I believe is
closer to common notions of "most".

Christy's second mention of natural variability
in the 1997 testimony is as follows: "You go from one century to the
next and there are large changes. The 21st Century will be different
than the current one. It's definitely the case that the 19th Century
was unusually cool. Bouncing back from that, as Dr. Lindzen [another
contrarian] said, is part of the natural variability...". After this
second comment on variability, Eric Barron, Director of the Earth
System Science Center at Penn State University, and I, who were also
speaking at the hearing, jumped in with a rejoinder. The conversation
went as follows:

DR. BARRON: You just don't know whether we're
bouncing back from anything.

DR. SCHNEIDER: How do you know we're bouncing back?
How do you know it wasn't stopped by the increase of emissions from
initial deforestation and industrialization? You're presupposing you
know the climate is random. We don't know that. That's what we're
interested in figuring out.

DR. CHRISTY: We're looking at temperatures that were
warmer in past centuries than today.

DR. BARRON: But how do you know that it wouldn't have
continued?

SENATOR CHAFFEE: What does he know what wouldn't have
continued?

DR. SCHNEIDER: That the recovery is in fact a
recovery. Maybe it's induced. We don't know that. That's one of the
difficult issues where it might be partly related to some changes in
the energy output of the sun. There are a number of aspects we can
debate. That's what we're trying to figure out, the relative amounts,
but you can't presuppose that the recent variations in the system are
all natural...we know that humans started changing the land surface and
started changing the atmosphere, which we began to do significantly in
the 18th Century, so we cannot actually rule that potential influence
out yet. That's part of the debate.

DR. BARRON: The objection occurs when he says the
world is bouncing back from an unusually cold period. It's just as
possible, because of the way natural variability works, that it was in
the midst of bouncing to an even colder century and therefore we have
an even bigger problem than we're thinking. By saying that, he's
presupposing he knows the mechanisms and the way natural variability
works.

DR. CHRISTY: I would say most of that occurred before
these events you're talking about affected the climate.

DR. SCHNEIDER: I'm not saying humans created a little
Ice Age. What I'm arguing is that it's often said this is just the
recovery from that. Well, it's the recovery but that doesn't mean that
there wasn't a human component of that recovery and that's what we're
trying to figure out.

Many years later, in a December 12,
2003 speech at a conference hosted by the CATO Institute, one of many
"independent" think tanks partially supported by ExxonMobil and other
big players in the fossil fuel industry (see "What
Exxon doesn't want you to know" and www.exxonsecrets.org),
Christy commented that he did not think the human portion of climate change
would be dangerous: "I don't see danger, I see in some cases adaptation, and
in others something like restrained glee at the thought of longer growing seasons,
warmer winters and a more fertile atmosphere." This seems consistent with his
past views. However, in that same speech, I did detect a subtle shift in language
over the causes of global warming. Christy repeated that the causes of global
warming are not entirely certain, but I believe he placed less emphasis on the
natural component: "Increased CO2 is part
of the temperature rise (how much is more arguable). Massive alterations of
the land surface - yes, that is part of the observed global warming, and it
is clearly human induced. Pollution? Yes, especially in local climates. Nature?
Absolutely, nature is responsible for part of the global warming we've seen.
We don't know precisely how much contributes, nor do we know completely why
the climate even does what it does." Rather than attributing "most" global warming
to natural variability as he did in 1997, Christy says natural factors are responsible
for "part" of it. While using "most" and "part" may be technically consistent,
I would argue that the terms imply very different things. I thought the role
of anthropogenic activities in climate change was even more pronounced in a
December 16, 2003 speech Christy gave at the American Geophysical Union's (AGU)
autumn meeting in San Francisco (see a press release summarizing the meeting and an NPR audio report on the AGU meeting, which includes the
quote below). In that speech, Christy said: "It is scientifically inconceivable
that after changing forests into cities or putting dust and soot into the atmosphere
and putting millions of acres of desert into irrigated agriculture and putting
greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, that in some way the natural course of
the climate system has not been changed." Since the two choices of climate forcings
are human and/or natural, if Christy's implied view of the contribution of natural
forcings is decreasing (from "most" to "part"), then his implied view of the
contribution of human forcings must be increasing.

In an earlier version of this website, I reported the recent
Christy quote and stated that Christy has apparently reversed some of his earlier
views about the lack of an anthropogenic component in global warming. I very
quickly received an e-mail from him, dated January 6, 2004 and titled "Palo
Alto, we have a problem," saying I had misrepresented him as a reformed contrarian.
He provided me with a copy of his December 2003 CATO Institute speech (discussed
above), which he said summed up his real, allegedly unchanged views. However,
quite frankly, I have trouble seeing how his statements over time, as quoted
above, don't indicate an evolution toward admitting there may be a notable anthropogenic
component to recent warming. We encourage our readers to make their own conclusions
about whether Christy's views have undergone a slight phase shift or not. I
hope he will be influenced by the Fu et al. and other work (cited earlier) to
seriously reconsider his own hardened views about satellite data and the contrary
evidence he says they provide.

Reinforcing all of these contrarian views and
conjuring up new and even more provocative "evidence" is Bjørn Lomborg,
a Danish statistician best known (or most notorious, at least) for his book,
The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001). In a nutshell, The
Skeptical Environmentalistcontends that the claims made by many natural
scientists that large-scale degradation of the environment is taking place are
false, or at least exaggerated; Lomborg says the "litany" being publicized by
such people is not grounded in fact or solid scientific research, yet it still
infiltrates into the media, where people adopt that view, or are at least frightened
by it. Lomborg believes that the state of the environment is actually improving
in most cases. Some specific examples he gives are that: 1) acid rain has hurt
lakes but barely impacted forests; 2) we are experiencing an increase, not a
decline, in ecosystem services; 3) the 1989 Exxon-Valdez oil spill was not nearly
as bad as environmentalists make it out to be; and 4) biodiversity loss has
been grossly exaggerated. By far the most controversial chapter of Lomborg's
book is that on global warming. He states that money used to reduce global warming
now would be better spent on reducing the burden of the poor by building hospitals,
schools, and clean water infrastructure. He uses the Kyoto Protocol as a specific
example. He believes that it should not be implemented, as the $80 to $350 billion
he asserts it would cost per annum to do so would only delay warming by six
years, and would be better spent on dealing with the immediate problems of the
world's poor. That same money, he says, could give clean water and better sanitation
to the entire developing world, saving two million lives and preventing disease
in another 500 million. For Lomborg, intergenerational equity and damage to
nature do not appear to be pressing concerns.

When asked for a quick response on Lomborg, I often tongue-in-cheek
reply that if experts in all of the four fields — climatology, demography,
ecology, and conservation biology — that Lomborg accuses of exaggerating
environmental risks were so ignorant that their projections were little better
than random answers drawn from a hat, what is the probability that all four
groups got it wrong, and wrong in the same direction (i.e., they projected environmental
damages that are worse than what actually ends up occurring)? One sixteenth
is the answer, for if experts in each of these fields had only random skill,
there would be a 50% probability that each exaggerated by chance. So, 1/2 times
1/2 times 1/2 times 1/2 is 1/16, the chance that consensus opinion in all four
fields is overblown. On the other hand, what is the probability that Lomborg
miscalculated or misrepresented each of these fields quite consistently and
in line with his ideology and well-paid storyline? I'd say that probability
is a lot greater than one in sixteen — probably greater than 2 out of
3.

Formal reactions to The
Skeptical Environmentalisthave been polarized. It was embraced with
great eagerness by various organizations and publications, including The Washington Post, The Economist and The American
Geological Institute. After the book's publication in English in 2001
(it was published in Danish three years before that), Lomborg was named a Global
Leader for Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum (November 2001), chosen by a
newly-elected conservative government to head Denmark's Environmental Assessment
Institute (February 2002), and named one of the "fifty stars of Europe" by Business
Week (June 2002) and one of the world's 100 most influential people by Time
Magazine (April 2004). He has been recognized by major media establishments,
and his views, too, have infiltrated the media and gained support. But most
scientists I know working on these problems are outraged by Lomborg's work and
consider it to be faulty and misrepresentative of their published views. In
addition to referencing a biased sample of literature that wasn't nearly broad
enough, Lomborg used quotes out of context and proved numerous times that he
did not fully understand the science behind climate change. Sure enough, soon
after the publication of The Skeptical Environmentalist, many
who disagreed were quick to publish rebuttals (see reviews inGrist Magazine,The Guardian, The New York Times Higher Education Supplement, and The Beagle). In a collaborative effort, John Rennie,
the editor in chief of Scientific American; John Holdren, a Harvard professor
specializing in energy/resources, environmental science, and public policy;
John Bongaarts, vice president of the Population Council in New York City; Thomas
Lovejoy, biodiversity adviser to the president of the World Bank and senior
advisor to the president of the UN Foundation; and I authored a comprehensive
rebuttal to Lomborg's work that was published in Scientific
American. Rennie wrote an introduction, and Holdren, Bongaarts, Lovejoy, and
I focused on topics in Lomborg's books that corresponded to our areas of expertise:
energy, population, biodiversity, and climate, respectively. In my section on
global warming, I had four grievances:

That Lomborg arbitrarily decided that climate sensitivity had to
be on the low end of the IPCC's estimate of 1.5oC
to 4.5oC;

That Lomborg only considered the least serious of the IPCC's
emissions scenarios;

That the benefits of avoiding climate change ($5 trillion, he
declares) are said to not be worth the cost to the economy of
constraining fossil fuel emissions ($3 to $33 trillion), yet no
monetary estimate is given for potential climate damages to nature; and

That he assumes that the Kyoto Protocol will be the only emissions agreement
in effect for the hundred years, whereas it is only intended to be in force
until 2012 at the latest.

Rebuttals then flew back and forth (see, for example, Lomborg's rebuttal of our review in Scientific American and Rennie's
reply and John Holdren's response to the rebuttal), and new players
jumped into the commotion. For example, Bodnar
et al., 2004 published a scathing review of the treatment of environmental
health issues in The Skeptical Environmentalist. They found that
many of the inconsistencies that plague other parts of Lomborg's book also run
rampant in the chapters covering environmental health. Their main complaint
is that Lomborg fails "to apply the scientific method in a rigorous, reliable,
and logical manner". Specific examples of this include:

A distorted "global" perspective that relies mainly on data and
statistics from developed countries and assumes that conclusions for
developing countries can simply be extrapolated from that data;

A propensity to label those who promote and practice global
awareness and responsibility as doomsayers and pessimists, when that is
usually not the case;

Lack of discussion on reliability of published statistics used
throughout the book, few of which were subject to peer review (or
appeared in peer-reviewed journals).

And there are more. Negative book reviews were
written by Grubb, 2001;
Pimm and Harvey, 2001; Pimentel,
2002; and Gleick,
2001 and published in Science, Nature, BioScience, and on the
UCS website, respectively. There are likely many other scientists who
are also in agreement that Lomborg's work is deeply flawed.

In the end, the Danish Research Agency's Committee on Scientific
Dishonesty agreed with those of us who spoke out against Lomborg that Lomborg's
book was full of inaccuracies, ruling on January 7, 2003, that it fell within
the concept of "scientific dishonesty". (See a January
2003 Science magazine article on the ruling, and a Reuters article, "Panel: Danish Environmentalist Work 'Unscientific'"
pertaining to a similar report on Lomborg performed by a panel of Scandinavian
scientists.The actual report on the ruling has since been removed from the web,
presumably due to recent events – discussed below.) Opponents of Lomborg
praised the committee's decision (i.e., Woodard,
2003), while supporters were outraged (i.e., Pielke Jr., 2003).

However, in what was a boost to Lomborg supporters, at the
end of 2003, Denmark's science ministry rejected the Committee on Scientific
Dishonesty's finding that The Skeptical Environmentalist was scientifically
dishonest. As reported in a January 2004 Science magazine article on the subject,
the ministry claimed to find "... DCSD's findings flawed on several counts.
It held that DCSD's legal mandate is to rule on allegations of fraud, not on
accusations of failure to follow 'good scientific practise'. It also criticized
DCSD's ruling for lacking documentation, for failing to document the argument
that the book is dishonest, and for describing Lomborg's research in unduly
emotional terms. The ministry did not itself evaluate the soundness of the science
or the claims in the book." Ironically, the DCSD says that in addition to its
16-page report, it has 600 pages of supplemental materials supporting its finding,
so that claims by the ministry — a political body — that the DCSD
did not document the case against Lomborg are clearly false. The fact that the
science ministry did not focus on Lomborg's "science" or the claims he makes
in his book is rather perplexing, and for this reason, Stuart Pimm, an ecologist
at Duke University (and one of the first people to complain to DCSD about Lomborg's
book), calls the ministry's statement a political ad — "a pardon from
the political leadership" rather than a scientific exoneration. I find Pimm's
argument persuasive that the science ministry's ruling was a political decision,
rather than a legal pardon or a scientifically competent analysis. Despite this,
many reporters and others still attempt to canonize Lomborg. They found the
science ministry's ruling against the DCSD to be a major victory — even
though it was issued by the same government that hired Lomborg to head Denmark's
Environmental Assessment Institute — and their articles attempting to
balance contrarian opinion with that of mainstream climatologists are very misleading
(see, for example, "Sceptics, the environment needs you" and "Go ahead — buy that muscle car").

Lomborg hasn't stopped causing controversy. In May 2004,
he chaired a week-long conference, sponsored by Denmark's Environmental Assessment
Institute and The Economist, called The Copenhagen Consensus. The panel of eight
renowned economists attending the meeting was to allocate an imaginary $50 billion
to what it deemed were the highest-priority projects for improving the world.
The attendees were given a list of 10 global-scale problems that they were to
rank in order of importance, while trying to answer the question, "What
would be the best ways of advancing global welfare, and particularly the welfare
of developing countries, supposing that an additional $50 billion of resources
were at governments' disposal?" The 10 global challenges were: civil conflicts,
climate change, communicable diseases, education, financial stability, governance,
hunger and malnutrition, migration, trade reform, and water and sanitation.

More than 30 proposals were set out for the panel's review,
and it was decided that the control of HIV/AIDS (which falls under the communicable
diseases category) should receive $27 billion, followed by $12 billion to combat
hunger and malnutrition and $13 billion to attempt to eradicate malaria (also
under communicable diseases). To the horror of many, spending on climate change
was near the bottom of the priority list because the panel determined that costs
would exceed benefits and "approaches based on too abrupt a shift toward
lower emissions of carbon are needlessly expensive" (see the Copenhagen
Consensus final results and a post-meeting press release). This absurdly low ranking of climate
change begins to make sense when one views the methods used for "prioritization":

In ordering the proposals, the panel was guided predominantly by consideration
of economic costs and benefits. The panel acknowledged the difficulties that
costbenefit analysis must overcome, both in principle and as a practical matter,
but agreed that the cost-benefit approach was an indispensable organising method.
In setting priorities, the panel took account of the strengths and weaknesses
of the specific cost-benefit appraisals under review, and gave weight both to
the institutional preconditions for success and to the demands of ethical or
humanitarian urgency. As a general matter, the panel noted that higher standards
of governance and improvements in the institutions required to support development
in the worlds poor countries are of paramount importance.

Perhaps the results are not surprising, given that "the
dream team", as the eight economists attending the meeting have been called,
were all personally invited by Lomborg and paid $30,000 each to attend. To make
matters worse, some of the panel members, including Nobel Prize-winning economist
Vernon Smith, are known to be admirers of Lomborg (see "$50 Billion Question: World, Where to Begin?").
William Cline, an environmental economist for the Center for Global Development
in Washington, D.C., and the only environmental economist on the panel, suggested
that climate change was important to address and proposed a global carbon tax
as the most cost-effective strategy, but his ideas were shot down as very bad
investments because they would entail "large expenditures for benefits
that would come far in the future" (see "Economist Rate Greenhouse Gas Curbs a Poor Investment").

The more news that came out of the meeting, the more that
climate scientists and many others realized it was rigged to further Lomborg's
anti-environment motives. Calling the meeting a "consensus" was laughable,
in my view, given that only one type of guest -- the neo-classical economist
-- was invited. In order to achieve a true consensus, I think Lomborg would've
had to invite ecologists, social scientists concerned with justice and how climate
change impacts and policies are often inequitably distributed, philosophers
who couldchallenge the economic paradigm of "one dollar, one vote"
implicit in cost-benefit analyses promoted by economists, and climate scientists
who could easily show that Lomborg's claim that climate change will have only
minimal effects is not sound science. It's no surprise that a group of neo-classical
economists resorted to a typical cost-benefit analysis, but that doesn't make
it right or just or the most efficient way to spend $50 billion. I believe adding
other experts into the mix would have changed the results substantially, as
these types are not wont to condone the use of cost-benefit analyses that completely
exclude non-market entities like nature and the quality of life (see the 'Dangerous Climate Impacts and the Five Numeraires" section
of this Web site). For example, there are about a billion people in the world
who live on about $1 per day. They contribute next to nothing to the global
warming problem but will likely suffer the most from its effects. Most live
in marginal lands. Desertification -- the loss of productivity of the world's
drylands (about 50% of the ice-free surface) -- will likely get worse as climate
change spreads. Do these cost-benefit models care? Not at all! The poor of the
world contribute marginally to the world's economy, so the model conclusions
almost wholly neglect them. These models are only for the rich. Equity isn't
an issue. Equally, nature doesn't have a vote. Economists looking at standard
cost-benefit models treasure only what is traded. In addition, they tend to
place little value on the future thanks to high discount rates. If one chooses
a high discount rate, the future doesn't have a future. Choose a low one, and
it does. (Climate change modeling is extremely sensitive to the discount rate,
which is why there is so much debate over it.)

It is strange that Lomborg has advocated curing poverty
or addressing the lack of clean water as if either were in one to one competition
with resources needed for mitigating climate change. Deal with climate or deal
with poverty, he implies, as if those were the only possible tradeoffs -- a
totally false dichotomy!. That is abject nonsense! Why did Lomborg or his group
of elliptical cost-benefit "concensusites" not talk about trading
off subsidies for sport utility vechicles in the US or subsidies to EU farmers
against climate mitigation, or of trading the costs of the Iraq war against
poverty alleviation, rather than against climate mitigation?. The exclusive
alternatives he poses are at best naive and at worst disingenuous -- and I think
the latter is, unfotunately, more likely -- and this is fully consistent with
Lomborg's pattern of partial analysis.

Interestingly, less than a month after the Copenhagen Consensus,
Lomborg announced that he was resigning as director of Denmark's Environmental
Assessment Institute and would return to his job as Associate Professor of social
science at the University of Aarhus (see Olsen, 2004). Lomborg says he is an academic at heart,
and now that the Environmental Assessment Institute, which sufered a stormy
period before his arrival, is on the right track and there is an "increasing
understanding and acceptance of the Institute's work" (as stated in an
EAI press release), he feels it's time to return to
research in academia. I can only hope that the EIA undergoes a true turnaround
and gets on the right track in his absence, and that Lomborg's future academic
endeavors are not as grossly inaccurate as his insights in The Skeptical
Environmentalist.

Despite Lomborg's clearly deceptive nature, he retains many
fans. One rather well-known Lomborg supporter is science fiction writer Michael
Crichton. Crichton was invited to Caltech in January 2003 to give the Michelin
Lecture; he accepted and presented a speech titled "Aliens
Cause Global Warming". In it, Crichton criticized mainstream scientists
for attacking Lomborg's publisher, Cambridge University Press, in what he calls
"the new McCarthyism". He also deplores Scientific American for the article
I co-authored, saying that Scientific American attacked Lomborg for eleven
pages and came up with few factual errors but only gave Lomborg one and one
half pages to write a rebuttal, which he contends was not enough space. He accuses
Scientific American of playing "Mother Church" and prosecuting poor Lomborg
in the same way that Galileo was prosecuted for his novel ideas. (I must comment
that likening Lomborg to Galileo is a very generous comparison — for Lomborg,
that is.)

Other subjects addressed in Crichton's speech are even more
outlandish. The title, as you might have guessed, brings Crichton to a shocking
analogy: just as humans wrongly believe that aliens exist, they also believe
that global warming is occurring, though it, too, is a fiction. He criticizes
"consensus science" as being wrong, citing as examples nuclear winter (which
many mainstream scientists believed could occur in the early 1980s, though it
hasn't), pellagra (a disease thought for many years to be caused by a germ but
found by a non-mainstream scientist to be diet), and continental drift (which
most scientists refused to accept as a theory until the 1960s, though it was
first proposed in 1912), among other things. He uses these examples of scientists
who broke with consensus opinion to segue into his praise of Lomborg.

John Perry, a Fellow and editor at the American Meteorological
Society, prepared an analysis
of Crichton's speech that repudiates many of his claims. On the issue of consensus
versus non-consensus opinion, he wonders why consensus views are automatically
wrong (and non-consensus views right) just because they have been on certain
rare occasions in the past. (Crichton never mentions positive consensus outcomes
in his speech, though there have been many.) Perry also criticizes Crichton's
comparison of climate and weather, saying that it is incorrect to assume that
climate is impossible to predict in the long-term just because weather is. They
are two very different systems, Perry reminds us, and there are many encouraging
signs that climate can be predicted. I wholeheartedly agree with Perry's review.
Crichton is a gifted science fiction writer, but unfortunately, when he dips
into real science like climate change, his declarations turn out — like
Jurassic Park — to be fictitious. His book and movie scenario of cloning
ancient ancient dinosaur DNA is the microbiological equivalent of space ships
rumbling in a vacuum -- good entertainment, impossible science. I'd as
much trust Michael Crichton, a medical doctor by training, on complex systems
science issues like climate change as I would one of the actor-doctors in his
ER television show operating on my appendix! Crichton acted like a medieval
scribe, simply repeating the litany of questionable science loudly professed
by most contrarians. He should either learn what he is talking about or stick
to his lucrative and creative science fiction practice. His anger at the global
warming polemical move, The Day After Tomorrow, is matched by Crichton's own
counter-polemical novel, (State of Fear), which might be more aptly titled
The Day Before Yesterday. This recently released novel just repeats Crichton's
absurdities; unabashed, he is crying all
the way to the bank, despite the outrage of so many real scientists at his polemics.
(See also Sandalow, 2005 -- Michael
Crichton and Global Warming., and Roberts, 2005 -- Crichton
Mad)

Even in the face of strong rebuttals of contrarian work
like the many mentioned above, some people, groups, and governments still adopt
the contrarian stance. In fact, perhaps the most powerful "contrarian" to date
is the Bush Administration. While President Bush may be most notorious (climate-wise)
for his rejection of the Kyoto Protocol in 2001 (see "Anger at US climate retreat"), he has proven his
unwillingness to address the global warming problem in many other ways as well.
In place of the Kyoto Protocol, Bush introduced an ineffective climate policy
founded on voluntary (rather than mandatory) greenhouse gas emission cutbacks
(see Ethan Podell's critique of the voluntary emissions scheme
in his October 1, 2003, testimony to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science,
and Transportation as part of their hearing on The Case for Climate Action).
The Bush plan called for more research to better understand the scope of the
problem, rather than any abatement measures, despite the fact that strong scientific
evidence is already available (see "The triumph of fringe science"). The Bush Administration
has been accused (and with merit, I believe) by a number of climatologists and
other scientists of its own form of "scientific dishonesty" — hand-picking
scientists (mostly contrarians) and advisers to further their moral and political
agendas rather than airing the scientific consensus of most government climate
scientists (see Herrera,
2004 and the "Sticking your neck out: some guidelines for communication"
section of Mediarology).

As for the Bush "climate policy", scientists and economists
have calculated that the Administration's "target" of reducing greenhouse gas
intensity by 18% by 2012 will actually cause emissions to increase by
13-15%. This is because, as stated by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient
Economy (ACEEE): "reducing carbon intensity is not the same as reducing
carbon emissions. Intensity is a relative indicator, expressed in kilograms
of carbon emissions per dollar of economic output." Yet economic growth can
outweigh intensity reductions, causing total emissions to increase. ACEEE's
analysis, which summarizes this “Carbon
Gap”, shows that drops in intensity don't necessarily mean drops
in emissions." (See also my discussion of emissions intensity in an answer to
a question from Senator Kerry related to my October 2003 testimony to the Senate
Committee on Commerce, Science, & Transportation as part of a hearing on
The Case for Climate Action.)

In late 2003, the CEI withdrew its lawsuit from the federal
court with prejudice, meaning it cannot be re-filed. While this was ostensibly
a victory for climate scientists and others supporting the National Assessment,
the lawsuit was withdrawn only after the White House Office of Science and Technology
Policy (OSTP) added a caveat to the website hosting the report stressing that
the report in question was not subjected to OSTP's Information Quality Act Guidelines
-- failing, however, to mention that the guidelines were not even in place when
the report was written! The CEI distorted the meaning of the caveat in a press release,
saying that it indicated "that the Clinton White House pressured bureaucrats
to rush out an incomplete and inaccurate report despite protests from government
scientists" and "that the federal government has now put the public on notice
that the National Assessment is propaganda, not science", The CEI report was
guided by the work of people like Patrick
J. Michaels. The caveat and the CEI's response incensed many scientists,
and they responded that the report underwent extensive peer review and would
have met the Information Quality Act Guidelines had they been in place (see
a statement
by the NRDC; a letter to James Mahoney, the Director of the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, from thirty-one of the scientists who
authored the National Assessment. It seems clear that the propaganda engines
spin hard at the White House and the CEI, much more so than at meetings of the
National Assessment team. I wonder if any of this will ever be reported by Lomborg,
or Crichton, or by Fox News in their "fair and balanced' rhetoric?

The Bush Administration's tendency toward gross exaggeration
about climate change as official policy has continued to affect and influence
the EPA. This was again made evident in June 2004, when the EPA rolled out a
very deceiving Energy Star ad campaign. Given that the campaign was for Energy
Star, a program the EPA created in 1992 to label energy-efficient appliances
and other items (like homes and buildings), it makes sense that it would focus
on energy conservation in the home -- see the EPA's press
release, which includes five steps everyone can do at home to save energy.
However, in TV ad spots filmed for the campaign (see the video
clips or a text description), the EPA seems to be suggesting that we
cannot improve the efficiency of cars and that conserving energy around the
home will do more good anyway. The ads show a woman, Suzanne, who is lambasting
her husband's efforts at rigging their car first with a sail, then with a contraption
with satellite dishes, and finally with a helium tank, in order to improve fuel
efficiency and thus save energy. She comments that "the EPA says the energy
we use in our home can cause twice the greenhouse gases of a car". What
she fails to bring up is that most households have multiple vehicles, not to
mention that the EPA states in a report (US
Emissions Inventory 2005) on its own Web site that greenhouse gases
generated in the US by the transportation sector account for 27% of total greenhouse
gas emissions, whereas residential use accounted for only 6%. (The tranportation
line in the EPA's graph also appears to have a steeper slope than the residential
line, meaning emissions from transportation are increasing more rapidly than
emissions from residences.) In addition, David Friedman, a senior policy analyst
with the Union of Concerned Scientists, says that with a car, you can cut your
fuel usage in half by driving a hybrid, but it's unlikely that you'll halve
your home electricity use (see a New York Times article, "E.P.A.
Energy-Saving Spots Give Cars Short Shrift"). The EPA says it did
not intend to underplay the importance of reducing vehicle emissions, and only
wanted to make an Energy Star-centric ad, but it is difficult to believe this
stance after viewing the ad.

The debate over the April 2003 Sense of the Congress on
climate change and its related rebuttals, and rebuttals of rebuttals, continues.
In July 2003, Republican Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the Chairman
of the Committee on Environment and Public Works, made a floor speech to the
Senate on "The Science of Climate Change". In it, in addition to
elevating my status to "the father and promoter of the catastrophic global warming
fearmongers," Inhofe states that "catastrophic global warming is a hoax", and
possibly the greatest hoax "ever perpetrated on the American people"; that an
additional 1.4oC of warming "doesn't really matter," and that the uncertainties
associated with climate change have not been reduced from one IPCC report to
another, among other things. Follow-up questions in October (2003) Senatorial
testimony (see next paragraphs) on the 'Case for Climate Change Action', answered
by Mann, by Wigley, and by Schneider serve as rebuttals to the Inhofe speech. Nevertheless,
Inhofe went on to create a brochure based on his July 2003 speech titled "The
Facts and Science of Climate Change", which contained few facts and little competent
science, and he distributed it at the UNFCCC's ninth Conference of the Parties
(COP9) meeting in Milan, Italy, in December 2003. His actions brought to mind
a favorite Mark Twain quote: "Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose
you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." An article by Chris Mooney, 2004 also debunks the Senator's
views.

Representative Waxman has again spoken out against the Bush
Administration's lack of scientific integrity and tendency to politicize science
to the point that it is untrue. This time, it was regarding a new measure implemented
by the Bush Administration that requires all government scientists to be cleared
by a Bush political appointee before they can advise the World Health Organization
(WHO). Officials in the Bush Administration claim that they are only trying
to assure that the WHO receives advice only from the best scientists, but we
agree with Waxman that "the administration is tightening their controls
over the professionals and their scientists...to favor its right-wing constituents"
(see "Gov't scientists need approval to help WHO").

Fortunately, courageous members of Congress like Henry Waxman,
John McCain, and Joe Lieberman help to maintain our respect for some politicians.
In January 2003, Senators John McCain (R - AZ) and Joe Lieberman (D - CT) co-sponsored
the Climate Stewardship Act Amendment (S. 139), which, had it been passed, would
have called for companies emitting more than 10,000 tons of carbon annually
to reduce emissions to 2000 levels by 2010 (see an October 2003 statement by Lieberman on the amendment). Senators McCain
and Lieberman bemoaned the poor record of the Bush Administration on the subject
of climate change, noting that the Senate had not debated the issue of mandatory
emissions controls since 1998. They pointed out that the amendment, fashioned
after the acid rain segment of the Clean Air Act, would be relatively easy to
implement, costing only $20 per household annually, not a bad price for slowing
global warming! The amendment would affect electric utilities, major industrial
and commercial entities, and the refining (of transportation fuels) industry,
but in reality, taking measures to curb emissions could actually cause some
of these companies to save money in the form of efficiency gains.
In addition, the amendment would permit the industries affected to engage in
emissions trading, thereby creating an effective market for greenhouse gas reduction.

Many reputable businesspersons and scientists
backed the McCain-Lieberman amendment and showed their support by
testifying to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science &
Transportation at an October 1, 2003, hearing on "The Case for Climate
Action". My testimony focused on the climate science,
the possibility of "dangerous" climate change, the impacts of global
warming, and the policy implications of all of these, reminding those
in attendance that policy decisions should be aided by scientific
evidence but are ultimately value judgments that must be made by
decision-makers. Tom Wigley of the National Center for
Atmospheric Research also testified on climate science, giving more
detail on temperature changes in the 20th and 21st
centuries. Providing a business perspective was Christopher Walker, the Managing Director of
Greenhouse Gas Risk Solutions for Swiss Re, the world's second largest
reinsurer. Walker provided convincing evidence that businesses do care about climate change and
want to do something about it. Swiss Re has acknowledged that "climate
change is a fact" and is concerned about how climate change-driven
natural disasters will affect its property and casualty, life, and
health insurance lines. These concerns led it to hold various
conferences on the risks and opportunities posed by greenhouse gases
and to form a Greenhouse Gas Risk Solutions unit in 2001. This unit has
done its part in the effort to prevent climate change by providing
companies with insurance to eliminate emissions trading risk, raising
the credit rating of alternative energy projects by providing them with
insurance, which decreases the projects' cost of capital, financing
energy efficiency projects, and developing programs for voluntary
reductions of greenhouse gases, among other things. They advocate sound
market-driven public policy balanced between environmental goals and
social objectives. They hope that such efforts by Swiss Re, Insurance
Australia Group (see Tony Coleman's paper on climate risk and how
IAG is confronting it) and other insurance and reinsurance companies
will help them to avoid the $150 billion per year in losses that global
financial centers are expected to incur within the next ten years.

As the McCain-Lieberman bill went to vote at the end of
October 2003, it appeared that there was much support for it (see "Testing the Senate's Mettle") and that it was backed
by a bipartisan coalition. However, in the end, the amendment was defeated,
with a vote of 43-55. While disappointed, Senators McCain and Lieberman considered
the growing support for measures to slow or stop global warming encouraging,
as discussed in a press release on Lieberman's website (see also “The Thrill of Defeat”). The vote also brought
some surprises: Six Republicans, including senior Senator Richard Lugar (IN),
voted in favor of the amendment, while ten Democrats voted against it (see voting results). Republican Senator Gordon Smith of Oregon’s
take on the Climate Stewardship Act (that the bill is supposedly
"more politics than science") is a very common explanation (or excuse) for voting
against the bill. (See a rebuttal
of Senator Smith's statement written by a group of scientists from the
Pacific Northwest.) In reality, the bill is the product of politics reflecting
sound science. However, 43 Senators voting for mandatory climate emissions reductions
is a major step forward relative to the 95-0 Byrd-Hagel Sense of the Senate
vote in July, 1997 which opposed U.S. targets at Kyoto if poor countries like
China or India didn't also have targets. This myopic view disregarded the fact
that rich countries dumped 80% of the greenhouse gases that have built up since
1950, use ten times more energy per capita, and have gotten many times
richer per person than the citizens of poor countries, and should therefore
take the first step. So, this 43-55 vote defeat was also a victory. McCain and
Lieberman hope to bring up the bill for another vote on the Senate floor and
are hoping that the increasingly bipartisan effort on climate change policy
will help to get it passed (see "Housewarming - Bipartisan House bill" may signal
growing consensus on climate change). However, even if the bill were to pass
the Senate, it would likely have more difficulties in the House of Representatives.
House majority leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) and Representative Richard Pombo (R-CA)
have co-authored numerous editorials with titles like "Drilling Won't Harm Environment"
and are known to be anti-environment when it comes to lawmaking.

So, despite the optimistic undertones, the McCain-Lieberman
vote went to show that while they and their supporters have made clear their
dismay over the Bush Administration's environmental unfriendliness clear (see,
for example, Nitze, 2003; Barnett and Somerville, 2003; and Lautenberg,
2004, who states "Ignoring the accumulation of thirty years of science
may serve the narrow, shortsighted interests of a few but, in the long run,
it will harm us all"), the Administration's views, like those of the contrarian
scientists, have attracted a loyal following in the political realm and especially
in the media debate (see an Anti-'Climate-Alarmist' reply to Barnett and Somerville,
long-time fossil-fuel industry funded contrarians; see also a letter to Science editor Donald Kennedy by the contrarian
Fred Singer, supporting the Bush Administration, and Kennedy's response). This
is what fuels the fire of "Courtroom Epistemology".

Shortly after the McCain-Lieberman vote, the Office of Management
and Budget (OMB) singled out thirteen government programs it considered failures
and eventually hopes to shutter. Among them, unsurprisingly, were the EPA's
$9 million environmental education program and the $11 million nuclear research
initiative (which falls under the watch of the Department of Energy) -- see
"OMB Draws a Hit List of 13 Programs It Calls Failures".
It is sad to think that the White House is willing to spend billions upon billions
of dollars on military adventures and defense, with no clear evidence that this
has enhanced our long-term security, but it restricts much smaller amounts of
money (that could have benefits measured over centuries) when it comes to the
protection of the environment. In fact, in 2004, the Administration announced
it was going to cut funding of social science research related to climate change
(and abrupt climate change in particular) while simultaneously boosting funding
on research into so-called "clean coal technology". (See "Bush budget cuts environmental spending by 7 pct").

This trend has been continued by Republican leaders in the
U.S. House of Representatives. A memo dated February 4, 2004 which came out
of the communications office of the House Republican Conference (the organizational
entity for all Republican members of the House of Representatives and their
staff, headed at the time by Representatives Deborah Pryce, Jack Kingston, and
John Doolittle) acknowledged that Democrats would likely pummel the Republicans
on environmental issues as the 2004 presidential election neared. As a precaution,
it provided Republicans with "talking points" on dealing with environmental
topics. According to an article "GOP Split by environment strategy" produced
by Gannett News Service on March 23, 2004 (and published in The Desert Sun of
Palm Springs, CA), the memo states that: "'Global warming is not a fact', 'links
between air quality and asthma in children remain cloudy' and that the EPA is
exaggerating when it says at least 40 percent of U.S. streams, rivers, and lakes
are too polluted for drinking, fishing, or swimming", and it advises Republicans
to convey such claims to voters (see excerpts). While using the talking points is not mandatory
for Republicans, many of the more moderate members of the party were angry nonetheless;
Republican House member Mike Castle (Del.), for example, found the strategy
to be overly negative and defensive as well as evasive on the health threats
of pollution. Perhaps Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords, now an independent (after
defecting from the Republican party in 2001) summed it up best when he called
the memo "outlandish" and an attempt to deceive voters. Differing views on the
environment will likely further polarize relations between the Democrat and
Republican parties, as well as within them.

Ironically, shortly after the Republican Conference memo
was released, the Pentagon produced a report warning of the havoc that climate change could
wreak on the planet as soon as the next few decades. The report, commissioned
by Pentagon defence adviser Andrew Marshall (a very senior official often fondly
called Yoda -- after the Star Wars movie character) and authored by Peter Schwartz,
a CIA consultant, and Doug Randall of the Global Business Network, focuses on
the potential for near-term abrupt climate change. It contends that between
2010 and 2020, annual average temperatures could drop by up to 5 degrees Fahrenheit
over Asia and North America and up to 6 degrees Fahrenheit in Europe (due to
a collapse of Thermohaline Circulation beginning in 2010 -- see Climate Impacts for more detail on Thermohaline Circulation),
while temperatures could rise by up to 4 degrees Fahrenheit in places such as
Australia, South America and southern Africa. Extreme weather events will become
more frequent and intense, say Schwartz and Randall, and human carrying capacity
will decrease, causing instability and insecurity and the possibility of war,
disease and famine. This view of impending damages from climate change, while
overly radical, contrasts starkly with the rhetoric coming out of the Bush Administration.
Robert Watson, chief scientist for the World Bank and former chair of the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change, summed it up when he said: "Can Bush ignore the Pentagon?
It's going to be hard to blow off this sort of document. It's hugely embarrassing.
After all, Bush's single highest priority is national defence. The Pentagon
is no wacko, liberal group; generally speaking it is conservative. If climate
change is a threat to national security and the economy, then he has to act.
There are two groups the Bush Administration tends to listen to, the oil lobby
and the Pentagon." (For this and other quotes, see an Observer article, "Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us".)
I am skeptical as to whether the Bush Administration will heed the Pentagon's
advice, which, despite an over-the-top disaster scenario, includes several excellent
steps that the US should take to prepare for climate change (from pages 2-3
of the Pentagon report) :

Improve
predictive climate models to allow investigation of a wider range of
scenarios and to anticipate how and where changes could occur.

Assemble
comprehensive predictive models of the potential impacts of abrupt
climate change to improve projections of how climate could influence
food, water, and energy.

Create
vulnerability metrics to anticipate which countries are most vulnerable
to climate change and therefore, could contribute materially to an
increasing disorderly and potentially violent world.

Identify
no-regrets strategies such as enhancing capabilities for water
management.

Rehearse
adaptive responses

Explore
local implications

Explore
geo-engineering options that could control the climate [but see Schneider,
2001a for a cautionary note].

At the same time the Pentagon report was being hyped, the
media also picked up on a film released on May 28, 2004, titled The Day After
Tomorrow, a 20th Century Fox eco-armageddon movie. The Day After Tomorrow
depicts horrible global-warming-induced scenarios, including tidal waves sweeping
through cities, snow piling halfway up New York City's skyscrapers and pounding
other cities like New Delhi, tornadoes ripping through Los Angeles, and hail
the size of grapefruits devastating Tokyo (see "Hollywood disaster film set to turn heat on Bush" and
"New Movie Could Make Climate A Star"). As noted before,
this exaggerated global warming scenario is "balanced" by Michael
Crichton's comparably ridiculous anti-environmental polemic, State of Fear.

I believe that both the contributors to the
Pentagon report and the Hollywood producers of The Day After
Tomorrow, though way ahead of the Bush administration in
recognition of the need for serious climate policy measures, built
their cases on scenarios almost no responsible scientists would endorse
as more than fanciful (especially the movie). However, the potential
seriousness of abrupt climate changes should not be ignored, as
discussed in Climate Impacts. Rahmstorf, 1997; Calvin, 1998; and Lemley,
2002. The need for climate policy is easy to defend, even with
less extreme mainstream climate change scenarios (see Climate
Policy).

The Pentagon report reminded me of a 1977 book called The
Weather Conspiracy: The Coming of the New Ice Age, authored by
a group called The Impact Team, which was made up of reporters, writers, researchers,
and "back-up" people, as they called themselves -- but no weather experts among
the 18 of them. Hence, they were forced to rely on outside scientific "expertise",
so they turned to two CIA reports on global cooling. At the end of 1977, I wrote
a review of The Weather Conspiracythat appeared in Nature magazine
titled "Against
instant books", in which I commended the Impact Team for their extensive
(albeit incohesive) material on climate and for their proposed measures for
combating their hypothesized global cooling, but berated them for their treatment
of a controversial scientific topic (whether the planet will warm or cool) as
a one-sided issue. They were very firm in their assertions that global cooling
would indeed occur, rather than facing the reality of the discipline: that we
did not know enough to choose definitely at that stage whether we were in for
warming or cooling - or when. Allegations like those of The Weather Conspiracy
and the CIA reports upon which it was based, when pitted against reports such
as the recent Pentagon one and movies like The Day After Tomorrow, spawn
debates that just confuse policymakers and give them an excuse for "wait and
see" policies. In "Against instant books", I argued that what policymakers need
is: "a realistic assessment of what is and isn't known about the science of
problems like climate change, along with some estimates of the vulnerability
of different segments of society to a variety of plausible climatic scenarios;
and also, some estimate of how long it might take the scientific community to
reduce the large uncertainty that exists over the alternative projections of
the future." This is not much different from the advice I often give today,
some 25 years later, now that nature has "cooperated" with theory and a "discernible"
impact of humans on climate has been clearly detected.

While we can forgive Hollywood for artistic license and
unrealistic scenarios, the actual science, such as that found in the
US National Assessment and IPCC reports, is bad enough: coin-flip odds of serious
climate change should motivate any responsible official concerned with stewardship
of the Earth and our children's futures to act to mitigate such a high chance
of risks. The too-soon scenarios of the Pentagon and the essentially impossible
scenario of the movie producers do not detract from the fact that their call
for climate policy is justified by mainstream scientific scenarios that do not
include near-term ice ages in New York or a total collapse of the Gulf Stream
in a decade or so from now (though elements of these scenarios could become
realities far into the future). Unlike the earlier CIA pieces, the Pentagon
report was intelligently written, had good policy suggestions, and had the right
motivation, especially in addressing uncertainty in the climate change debate
and the need to confront the possibility of abrupt events:

Rather than predicting how climate change will
happen, our intent is to dramatize the impact climate change could have
on society if we are unprepared for it. Where we describe concrete
weather conditions and implications, our aim is to further the
strategic conversation rather than to accurately forecast what is
likely to happen with a high degree of certainty. Even the most
sophisticated models cannot predict the details of how the climate
change will unfold, which region will be impacted in which ways, and
how governments and society might respond. However, there appears to be
general agreement in the scientific community that an extreme case...is
not implausible...history tells us that sometimes the extreme cases do
occur, [and] there is evidence that it might...and it is the DOD's
[Department of Defense's] job to consider such scenarios (pages 7-8).

While I think there is only a minute (say, 1 in 1000 or
less) chance that Europe's climate could resemble that of Siberia by 2010, this
is as projected as plausible in the Pentagon report (page 11); the more realistic
prospects of enhanced droughts and floods, rising sea levels, super heat waves
(like those that killed some 30,000 in Europe in summer 2003), disturbed patterns
of plants and animals, melting glaciers, and slowly-building changes that could
potentially be irreversible over time, should be enough to motivate any person
who puts the planet and our future above short-term politics often driven by
campaign contributions. I do, though, appreciate the Pentagon report's advocacy
of the precautionary principle and its warnings that global warming could become
a serious national security issue:

Violence and disruption stemming from the stresses
created by abrupt changes in the climate pose a different type of
threat to national security than we are accustomed to today. Military
confrontation may be triggered by a desperate need for natural
resources such as energy, food and water rather than by conflicts over
ideology, religion, or national honor. The shifting motivation for
confrontation would alter which countries are most vulnerable and the
existing warning signs for security threats.

In these respects, "Yoda's" strategic thinking is miles
ahead that of the Bush Administration, but his cause is not helped by
essentially implausible scenarios. That the Bush Administration had the temerity
to propose cutting funding for climate change research (and especially
abrupt climate change research) is inexplicable in all but their own political
calculus. My fear is that the usual contrarian backlash will try to paint environmental
science and scientists with the same brush as the people behind these recent
scare shows (to some extent, the Pentagon report, and particularly the Fox movie),
and unfortunately, many won't see the difference between the scientific groups
and other groups. As noted, Michael Crichton's counter-polemic to The Day
After Tomorrow neither balances the situation or honestly educates the public.
Dueling exaggerations via Hollywood just add to the confusion.

For this reason, many mainstream climatologists, environmental
groups, and well-informed reporters have seized upon the opportunity that the
Pentagon report and The Day After Tomorrow have produced to attempt to
better inform the public and policymakers on climate change and the possibility
of abrupt events stemming from it. Myles Allen's lighthearted review of the
movie in Nature
magazine suggests that people should go see the film but understand that it
is seriously overblown relative to the worst scenarios most climatologists could
imagine. If it pushes students to study climate or policymakers to implement
more stringent GHG emissions abatement measures, then perhaps it has been successful.
In fact, the overwhelming message from most scientists and movie critics alike
is: Go see it, but don't consider it sound science. (For more reviews, see an
interview with policy analyst Frank Muller on ABC [Australian Broadcasting Corporation]
Radio National, Amanda Leigh Haag's review in The Daily Camera (Boulder,CO), Robert Semple Jr.'s review in The New York Times, Stefan Lovgren's article in National Geographic relating
to The Day After Tomorrow, containing commentary from Tom Prugh of the
Worldwatch Institute.) The Union of Concerned Scientists agree, and they attempt
to eliminate confusion by outlining the characteristics of abrupt climate change
in their brief report, "Abrupt Climate Change: Science, Science Fiction, and Helping
the Public Distinguish Between Them". Another example is The Pew Center
on Global Climate Change, which has created a web page titled "The Day After Tomorrow: Could it Really Happen?" to
educate the public on abrupt climate change. Other groups that have put together
informational pages on abrupt climate change after the release of the Pentagon
report and The Day After Tomorrow include the Worldwatch
Institute, weatherquestions.com, The Environmental Literacy Council, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute's Ocean & Climate Change
Institute, and the National
Resources Defense Council (NRDC) -- see articles in the NRDC global
warming media center. NOAA
also has an excellent primer on climate change on its website. These types of
tireless souls can keep the climate debate honest and prevent it from falling
into the hands of environmental extremists and/or glib contrarians and ideological
anti-environmentalists.

And finally, a recently released report ("Uncertainty
in Analyzing Climate Change: Policy Implications"), from the Congressional
Budget Office, examines the climate issues, and while stressing the uncertainties
-- including a number of papers by my students and myself -- it is forthright
in also showing climate change risks. This is in stark, and welcome, contrast
to the incredible nonsense of Senator Inhofe of the Republican Policy Committee,
mentioned earlier. Relative to the Contrarian views I've discussed above, here
is a refreshingly candid and honest examination.